María Sánchez Aparicio has been granted with the TCUE award

The student María Sánchez Aparicio receives the TCUE award for her Master thesis entitled: “Development of a software for the desing and analysis of mining operations”

Last October 10th, the results achieved in the market-oriented prototype under the 2016/2017 TCUE program were presented at the Faculty of Sciences. One of the 15 selected projects is entitled “Software development for the design and analysis of mining operations” developed by María Sánchez Aparicio, student of the Master Degree in Cartographic Geotechnologies in Engineering and Architecture, and tutored by Diego González Aguilera. The project consists of the development of the open source tool “Mining Information System” based on object-oriented programming. This project combines the advantages offered by Geographic Information Systems and 3D digitization strategies in order to improve the management and efficiency of mining operations during their life cycle.

The main possibilities offered by the software are:

Centralized management of multidisciplinary information.

Automatic generation of mining grids

Ability to use a large variety of geomatic sensors (laser scanner, drones, paraglide, etc.)

Management and visualization of high density point clouds.

Ability to integrate information within 3D models through a system similar to that used by BIM (Building Information Modelling) models.

The use of infrared thermography as a widely tested technique for building inspection and location of pathologies such as air leakage and moisture allows the performance of quality “in-situ” visual examination of the objects under study due to the possibility of obtaining real-time results, being able to detect without difficulty damages or material characteristics. This qualitative measurement technique provides the capability of doing quick, effective and non-destructive inspection without direct contact with the object under study, decreasing the risk of incidents to operators and the damage of the objects comparing with other intrusive techniques. Furthermore, the utility of infrared thermography as a measurement technique has been proved by its use for the determination of the thermophysical properties of materials such as diffusivity and thermal transmittance.

In the qualitative approach, some authors have performed in-situ studies, mainly in historical buildings or cultural heritage elements, whereas quantitative studies are performed mainly in laboratories with limited size samples. In those cases where quantitative thermography studies were performed in-situ, temperature values were employed in order to obtain the real thermophysical properties (thermal conductance) of the building envelope, but their spatial distribution is not considered.

Combine both applications will enable the automation of the heat loss computation from the measured temperatures with a thermographic camera. Thus, the thermography is not only used to represent the state of the wall, but also temperature values represented on the thermography for extracting the metric parameters of the study object so the hybridization of the thermographic information with precise cartographic material would allow to extract the actual geometry of the object of study with thermal texture, being able to make accurate measurements of the elements of interest directly on the obtained results.

Studies such as the one published by EuroACE in 2010, places improved energy efficiency in building construction at the top of the list of actions that need to be taken to reduce greenhouse gases and energy costs, in addition to acting as a stimulus to generate employment. In particular is the case of existing buildings stock, most of which dates back to the period 1940-80, constructed using non-existent standards and scarce resources. Here, energy refurbishment works could represent a saving of up to 75% in energy consumption. In Spain there are 13 million homes that could be the subject of intervention, where energy refurbishment could result in a reduction in sector emissions of 34% compared to 2001.

In urbanized Western Europe trees are considered an important component of the built-up environment. This also means that there is an increasing demand for tree inventories. Laser mobile mapping systems provide an efficient and accurate way to sample the 3D road surrounding including notable roadside trees. In this research line, a processing chain aiming at the extraction of tree locations and tree sizes from laser mobile mapping data is reached.

Vegetation extraction

Tree parameter extraction

Such steps, in combination with code optimization are expected to be sufficient to reach the final goal of automatized estimation of features sampled by mobile mapping at a rate that matches the acquisition speed and at a quality that matches the result of a human operator.